Perplexity open-sources SPACE: Giving AI full root access, yet leaving keys outside the virtual machine

Beating AI News Flash: Perplexity has open-sourced SPACE, the underlying sandbox platform that powers Computer, under the Apache 2.0 license.

SPACE is built on Firecracker and creates an independent micro virtual machine for each Agent task. AI can obtain root privileges inside, freely install software, and run commands, but cannot directly control the host machine. API keys are managed by a system outside the virtual machine, and all external network connections must pass through a dedicated gateway inspection to prevent Agents from unauthorized access.

SPACE also supports long-running Agent tasks. It can save the virtual machine's memory, running state, and files, allowing tasks to pause and resume, and even fork from the same progress to try different approaches, without having to start from scratch after every interruption.

Perplexity said that in July this year it had already replaced its original commercial sandbox service with SPACE, and currently creates millions of sandboxes every day. Compared with the previous service, the median latency for creating a sandbox dropped from 185 milliseconds to 60 milliseconds, an approximately 3x speed improvement.